Frieze

What happens when three people touch momentarily on a sidewalk in Florida? They are fused into one being for the briefest of moments. Creative nonfiction by Bubba Henson

Photo by Jordan Koons on Unsplash

Bubba Henson

Definition, noun: a broad horizontal band of sculpted or painted decoration, especially on a wall near the ceiling. Oxford Dictionary.

Father is putting himself out of the car limb by limb as age requires, when who do I see but Skinny Eric, posted right up to the barber pole, inches from his face, mouth agape to understand how the colors swirl to the top of the barber pole and then get to the bottom again so quickly – how does it all work?

We are in the soup – hot, humid egg-frier of a Florida day, clothing glued to skin. The Gulf sky is bruised. I have one eye on Father – I should be taking his arm – but I don’t see a chaperone on the sidewalk by Eric. Then, Eric’s eyes see me and his brain sends the surprise down to a smile with nothing but joy in it, at seeing someone he knows so far from home.

He says Hey like he hasn’t seen me in a year, and I say Eric, Eric as Father comes to the challenge of the curb and stops like a puppy meeting stairs for the first time. He is trying to put it all together: what to lift, where to send his balance if it’s still there – it’s not – and I put out an arm to receive him, to spot him, to give him something to hang on to, but Eric clasps my left hand in a handshake, his eyes on the union to make sure he’s doing it right – it looks good enough – then his eyes come to mine and he smiles his skinny smile again before a new idea builds itself and he pulls me in for a hug – this is what guys do – and we all freeze.

We freeze and are a frieze.

I take Father by the right arm; Eric has my left hand; Father has one foot on the curb, as do I; Eric is on the sidewalk. We are being human, but we don’t look human. We are in contact with each other. The goal is to greet, not fall, to get inside for a haircut. We freeze and are a frieze, but we are not frozen.

This is on Main Street. In front of a barber shop. Father is not giving advice, Eric is not chain-smoking, I am deciding who to save, Eric or Father. Darkening clouds. There are barbers on the other side of the glass, less than 15 feet away. A coin store next to the barber shop buys used gold. My car is across the street.

We touch each other and shake without shaking, weep without weeping. All tenses are present. Rivers reverse. Mountains deflate. The nuclei of everything that has ever crawled, flew, swam, or burrowed collapses into one cell, sucking the air out of the atmosphere. There is Father speaking at a podium at a National Marketing meeting, at a desk with a nameplate that keeps revolving, yapping – Sales Manager, Regional Manager, V.P. of Sales, V.P. of Marketing, President, CEO, Odysseus, Cyclopes, Minotaur, Big Joe. There is Father not home, a shadow where is he is supposed to be, and then he is standing in the doorway of my bedroom, a silhouette in a raincoat, carrying a briefcase. He is checking whether I am asleep, which I am not. I am faking.

Eric is in a garbage can under an overpass where he has lived for years until someone fishes him out and into a group home, where his meds are monitored and he can take the bus to some places, but not here, not downtown, without supervision. Skinny Eric is what his roommates and we volunteers call him. He destroys off-brand cigarettes with the ferocity of a circus bear, one with a traumatic brain injury and years of smoking spice, which leads him to gape at barber poles and into thought-corners he can’t get out of.

I am there, too, six years old, having wandered away from the Fourth of July picnic unnoticed, with a large rocket in my hand. I am the hero. I will chuck the bomb into a nearby stream, thus saving everyone – my family, the city of Little Rock, the world. But the bomb is a firework Father bought for Fourth of July, not just any firework, but the Grand Finale for the picnic, the holy-shit multi-stage size-of-a-beer-can rocket, but which has failed to go off on the first try and has been put aside to be dealt with later. Alone, my head full of stories about Kit Carson and Ethan Allen, I am the one to deal with it. I take it from the picnic table. I must hurry. Just as the fuse runs out, I launch it into the stream. And Father screams Idiot. Stupid. What are you doing?!!

What am I doing?

I am saving the world. I am keeping you from falling on your face. I am greeting Skinny Eric in a place where he should not be.

We are in Sarasota, FL. Frozen on Main Street. Someone is buying a rare coin nearby, a 4th century B.C. Athenian coin with an owl on its face. A trolley of tourists clangs by. Black, blond, and red hair-ends are swept into a dustbin in the barbershop. There are clocks everywhere: on the wall inside each store, on people’s wrists, on their phones. Seen from a drone or a passing car window, we are one single organism, the mirror of infinity repeating itself, mise en abyme, presenting a formula detectable only to blind 1’s and 0’s. The Library of Alexandria is burning. Flint pierces Achille’s heel. The peace in Joan of Arc’s eyes draws animals from the pastures and forests to kneel by the fiery stake. Scrolls unscroll, laws disappear, and papyrus returns to pith, to the wetlands, the nesting site for frogs and midges and mites. If a headless and armless marble torso can express all antiquity, why can’t all of time course through this union on the sidewalk? Father, Skinny Eric, me. Capacitor, amplifier, conductor, currency increasing in value, bones decreasing in density, memories aching to be forgotten.

Then, Father dissolves into ashes on the pavement. The pile is a color between grey and grey-brown, chalky. Were you to step on him? in him? Carelessly, without looking, you would wonder how to get him off your shoe. He has provided for cremation in his irrevocable trust. He has provided for everything in his irrevocable trust, including but not limited to the disposition of his wardrobe, which I, being the closest to him in size and looks, have benefitted from in advance of his immolation on those days when he decides to trim the edges of the closet by getting rid of marginal garments ahead of time. I am wearing one of his shirts on the sidewalk, which he grips by the sleeve. When we are urn-side, delivering eulogies, I will wear one of Father’s shirt and tie combos.

But this is not before Skinny Eric corkscrews into the sky like the barber pole freed, like a rocket, sending sparks onto the plastic sheet covering his bed, which I help him wash once a week. Skinny Eric is ashes, too, showering the dead lighters that litter the dusty floor in his room and mantling his mother's shoulders, who comes to visit him once a year in her sun-bleached blue PT Cruiser, with banana bread, his favorite. She gives him rolls of quarters. I know Skinny Eric; I see his potential to be struck by a car while crossing outside the crosswalk. I see him knocking the radio into the bath or choking on a chicken bone. I see the first thing his mother does when she hears the news is check his room for the rolls of quarters, only to find a field of dead lighters beneath his bed.

And I turn to stone – no, rubber. No, marrow. No, me. Little me, saving everyone from the bomb, bearing an Idiot/Stupid chevron on the sleeve of a shirt Father has given me, the little hero working his way through the labyrinth of disapproved career choices and partners, and lurid self-owns, not the least of which is admitting to Father that he hasn’t paid taxes in three years and then sitting for the inquisition for three days at Father’s kitchen table with a box of receipts and dull questions, until finally, even the guy with the accounting degree from the University of Arkansas throws up his hands and takes the little hero’s box to H&R Block, who delivers a verdict of 300K owed to the IRS. Life over. But the little hero’s friend suggests another CPA, who negotiates with the IRS, thus netting him a return of 25K, which he splits with his divorced wife, who uses her share of the money to get labiaplasty.

I am stone. No, tin foil. No, rubber, bouncing inside the outline of this pose.

A fuse has been lit on the sidewalk. In a park. In a garbage can under an overpass. It is 11:11 a.m. We are in Sarasota, FL. I am taking Father to his haircut. I am greeting Skinny Eric where he shouldn’t be. We hold on. We hold on and on and on, for centuries, countless seasons, until our position acquires a rare patina, a blush begging for burnishing. We are dissembled. We are tagged, crated, and carted into a garden by three men who don white cotton gloves to handle us and use guy wires to position us half-on/half-off a pedestal. Trees rise and fall. The nameplate degrades. Sections fall off and are repaired. Pieces fall off and are lost. Archeologists hypothesize about our purpose – no one knows for sure. Cultural garb and tokens point to relationships, again hypothesized. Curators make no mention of fireworks, garbage cans, board rooms, silhouettes, rolls of quarters, and haircuts. Observers mean well. We mean well. Eric, Eric, I say. How does it work, his mouth says. Father, I won’t let you fall. We are forgotten, prized, buried, and exhumed.

Then we break.

We break, and Eric grabs the bus back to the group home. I take Father in for his haircut, the usual, short, with attention to taming the cowlick in back, and I assist him off the curb and back to the car where I put him in limb by limb and take him home – the barber pole climbing, returning, reversing, climbing. As if nothing happened, except that it did and it does, and it will.

Poet Bubba Henson lives in Sarasota, FL., and teaches at State College of Florida. He has worked for MTV Networks, and has written for World Wrestling Entertainment, Golden Books, and the Hearst Media Group. His poetry, creative non-fiction, and short stories have been published in Blue Lake Review, The Raven’s Perch, Nifty Lit, Magazine1, The Laughing Unicorn magazines, and the Florida Bards Poetry Anthology 2024. He has an MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry from Columbia University.